Monday 8 September 2014

Byline Libya ..














Well, whaddya know? You're not all depraved, slobbering perverts, after all. My 'lesbian hooker' experiment has proved it! Following the mega-hits I got after blogging 'Pin-up girls..' I tried giving Friday's blog a mischievous, kinky title and .. guess what? I had fewer hits than I normally get! Yes, fewer!..

Very interesting, and from now on all my blogs will have erudite, sophisticated titles like wot today's has ..

By sheer chance I reached for one of my old scrapbooks on Friday and it opened at this page, featuring a press story I covered that involved a trip to sunny Libya.
It was twenty years ago to the day! How incredible .. and how on earth have twenty years gone by so quickly? It certainly was an adventure and a half, with myself and a reporter taking 14 hour ferry journeys from Malta to Tripoli and back - there were no flights into the city back then - only to find that the subjects of our story - women whose children had been 'kidnapped' by their Libyan fathers - had been 'got at' by a TV channel and they wouldn't play ball with us! I ended up - as you can see - taking mainly snatch distance shots at night - with flash - before we were told to go on our way ..  and they didn't say please! Of course, this was still in the days of film, so I had to wait until we'd arrived back in Manchester - and then hang on until the film was processed - before I could see what I'd actually got.
Well, we made the lead story in the paper that day - even getting back in time to make the lunchtime edition - and very happy I was with the result. The only downer? They'd bylined the writer .. and not me! I was furious, and immediately rang the office to complain. They managed to squeeze in a tiny name-check for the evening edition. Byline Libya! Happy .. 

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